Park City Mountain Resort Blog

Mid-Mountain Lodge Renovations

The new Crescent Lift isn't the only big project that we're working on this summer. One of our other big projects is a major renovation of the Mid-Mountain Lodge restaurant. A number of us took a quick trip this morning up to see some of the work being done. This include pretty much gutting everything on the inside of the building (in particular the restrooms and kitchen area), building some new steps to the Lodge and putting an outside grill on the deck. I took a number of photos, check 'em out:

Crescent Lift Progress

The cutting of the lift line for our new Crescent Lift is moving right along. The clearing is now coming over the ridge just above the base of the Ski Team lift and you may be able to see where we're marking off the area for the base terminal. This photo shows a look pretty much straight up the lift line from just a bit below where the base will be:

I'm hoping to get up on the mountain sometime next week to get some pix of some of the other projects we're working on, as well as perhaps a few more shots of the Crescent line from a different perspective.

Summer is here (finally), and improvements are underway!

I'm back! After a few weeks away from the office, things finally are looking like summer, even though it did snow a few inches just a week ago. But now the weather forecast is calling for temps near 90 for this weekend - I think that we may have skipped spring and gone directly to summer. Even so, many of the higher elevation trails are still snow covered and very muddy in other spots so please keep off them until they have a chance to dry out. A great resource to check out current trail conditions is the Mountain Trails Foundation's website at www.mountaintrails.org. We'll try to drop in an update here and there in our posts, but those guys are out and about everyday while I'm stuck inside the office ;)
The really cool news is that while I've been out and about for the past few weeks, our ops folks have been hard at work getting rolling with our summer projects, check out a few photos of the new lift!
The new Crescent lift line has been started, look to the left top part of the ridge, just next to the snow (Ski Team Lift on the right side of the photo).

Lift sections are already arriving (thanks for not parking in the lower part of the First Time parking lot)!

Keep checking back as I promise to post lots of photos of the new lift and our other summer improvements as things progress.

Earth Day - everyday is Earth Day

I find it hard to believe that we're nearing the 40th anniversary of Earth Day (the first one was observed back in 1970). At Park City Mountain Resort, the environment is a big event for us as we live and work in the Wasatch Mountains and we want to continue this lifestyle for us as well as for our children. Therefore for us, Earth Day isn't just April 22nd, it's all year long!
I'm excited that Park City Mountain Resort continues to expand our commitment to reducing our carbon footprint through various programs such as recycling, bio-fuels and CFL usage although the big news is that we recently committed to 100% offsetting of power from renewable resources via RECs (renewable energy credits) - see our environmental site www.saveoursnow.net and look for the press release for more details. Saveoursnow.net also give many more details on what we're currently doing, planning on doing and what you can do to help and educate yourself and others. Here are some great links to some other sites:

• www.keepwintercool.org
• www.theclimateproject.org
• www.wecansolveit.org

We've also been in the news recently talking about our environmental programs:

• The Park Record - Soul of the Green Machine
• KPCW - Radio Interview With Brent Giles and Krista Parry (link will download an MP3 file)

Happy B-Day Earth Day, we'll keep celebrating all year long!

Yes, It Is April

It has been quite a long time since I last posted; early March I think. Sorry about that, but it is a measure of how good the season was for us. It never stopped snowing long enough for me to have the chance to sit down and think of something useful to say. The best I could've come up with would have been something like, "snowing again; gotta go home, dig out the house and go to bed so I can get up at 4 AM and do it all over tomorrow."
That said, some final numbers for the season from our standpoint:
406 inches of snowfall at the Summit weather plot; the first time in 34 years we've gone over 400!
500 inches of snowfall at the Jupiter weather plot; only the 3rd time in resort history we've hit that number.
On closing day we had 10 FEET of settled snow depth at our Jupiter plot and every chairlift open (Jupiter Peak too!); the first time in a long time many of us can remember that happening. Judging by the party at the top of Jupiter Peak on Sunday afternoon, I'd say many many locals were pleased with that.
Since there is still SO MUCH snow and all the runs are still in great condition, I'm sure there's many locals out there who plan on "touring" the resort until the snow melts. As we leave the resort and head off for multiple adventures outta town, Colin, David and I just want to leave the locals with a reminder that there is no more avalanche control work being done. Treat the area like the back country and use all appropriate precautions (good route finding and travel skills, along with beacon, probe, and shovel). Especially if we get a rapid warm up when there could be a REAL danger of wet loose and slab avalanches.
Have a safe spring and summer and we hope to see you again next winter.

Enjoy the weekend - here's what is coming for next season...

It looks like we're going to finally get some Spring skiing and riding conditions, just in time for closing weekend. So, get out and enjoy the last turns for the 2007-2008 season - it sure has been a fun one!
In other news, I'm finally able to pass along the big news that I hinted at a couple of weeks ago, our planned capital improvements for the 2008-2009 winter season - check them out here and here's a picture to give you a hint of what we're going to be up to.

Is this seriously April?!

I admit it, I directly copied the title of this post from today's "Picture of the Day."

I also have to say that I completely agree with Matt's description of yesterday as "Are you serious?"  I took a bunch of runs up on McConkey's, Pioneer and Jupiter and once again I had another fantastic Monday morning up on the mountain, as a matter of fact, our run down Dead Tree off the High West traverse was one of the best runs I've skied all season!
The forecast is looking like we've got a least one more good storm coming in before our closing day, this coming Sunday, check out this graphic I just saw on the NWS website (I love the red text box!)

I hope to see everyone up on the mountain tomorrow, because there was hardly anyone out yesterday, enjoy the new snow!

Spring Powder Day!

I thought that perhaps we might be coasting into springtime with some blue sky days to ski corn snow and hang out on the decks around the mountain for awhile...I thought wrong!!! I awoke this morning to a good half foot of snow in my driveway and as I made my way up the mountain there was up to a foot or more in spots. Scott's Bowl was nearly bottomless and after I got a few face shots on my first run down I had to head back up for a 2nd run, which was just as good as the first. It was hard to take time away from the riding to get video, but here's a quick sample of what I was able to compile - I don't think it does the day justice, but take a peek and see what the last day of March was like up here!

 

Easter Eggs, Spring Skiing and the US Freestyle Championships

Yesterday saw people waiting in line at Payday to get out and participate in our 'big kids' Easter Egg hunt:

I know they must have had fun because we hid over 250 eggs on the mountain with great prizes including two Golden Eggs that had 2008-2009 Season Passes in them!

There was plenty of excitement for our 'little kid' guests as well, check out their Easter Egg hunting ground (yes all those dots are eggs!):

Here are the kids lining up:

And...

Ready...

Set...

GO!!!

What a great morning and day to be up in the mountain here at Park City!

I snuck out for a couple of runs this morning and while spring conditions are setting in during the afternoon, I found some perfect corduroy on Crescent/Waterfall. Be sure to check our Signature Runs page and our snow report page to see where the corduroy will be tomorrow and see this post from a couple of seasons ago to read some tips I have about how to ski or ride Park City Mountain Resort in the springtime.

Lastly, if you're up this Friday, be sure to stop by the Eagle Superpipe to see the best halfpipe skiers in the country compete in the 2008 Sprint US Freestyle Championships. There will also be events at the Utah Olympic Park and Deer Valley on Thursday, Saturday and Sunday with awards parties on Thursday, Friday and Saturday each evening at 5:30pm at the Town Lift Plaza!

Tubing at Gorgoza Park

We stopped by Gorgoza Park, this past Sunday and took a couple of quick video clips that probably don't show just how much fun we were having at the tubing hill:

The great news is that you have an extra week to enjoy the tubing at Gorgoza Park as they are now scheduled to close after April 6, 2008.
Although Gorgoza Park has extended their season by a week, it does not look likely like we (PCMR) will extend past our scheduled closing date of April 13, 2008. The reason for this is that we have a ton of work to do to get ready for our summer operations which are scheduled to open on May 23, 2008! There will be a lot of shoveling needed to unbury our Alpine Slide, we'll need to do some maintenance on Payday Lift and we will also be needing to move a lot of snow to get started on a major project that we'll be posting about soon (hint, hint, wink, wink).